Desvios

Entidades Organizadoras

Simon Preston Gallery is delighted to present Desvios, the third solo exhibition at the gallery by Brazilian artist Jessica Mein, which opens on 8 September and runs until 30 October, 2016.
The exhibition is comprised of a central video animation and a series of monochrome wall works. Desvio, 2016, shown on a large-scale monitor, is generated from fragments of a strip of found billboard material originally sourced from the back of a fifty-meter awning in Dubai. Each individual frame is initially scanned, then printed and further abstracted through various methods of incising, rubbing, cutting, zooming, mirroring, and finally captured again on a flatbed scanner. The sequential montage of more than a thousand individual images creates a consistent vertical linear strip animated by a constantly changing background and foreground. The resulting physicality of the image creates a sense of conventional recorded camera movement and reflects the physical form of traditional film.
Mein further confronts the materiality of images through a series of geometric works on canvas. Evolved from various forms of facsimiles captured through rubbings of architectural reliefs, the backs of completed unthreaded works, and directly rubbing on its surface, these copies are adhered onto the surface of the canvas. Mein then systematically interrupts the monochrome graphite images by rigorously cutting and unthreading the underlying fabric structure. Experimenting with the interplay between the actual impression on fabric and its surface, the excavated material creates subtle and varied, vertical and horizontal grids akin to minimalist traditions. However, each structure contains a precariousness of the handmade that interrupts the straight angles and hard edges, revealing its processes.
As reflected in the exhibition title, Desvios, translated from the Portuguese word meaning diversions, the works each create sites of controlled but uneven dismantling and misalignment. Evocative of mechanical printing processes, the materialization of the artist’s hand follows in the lineage of structural filmmakers, as an antithesis of traditional modes of mark making. The material process, with its emphasis on the copy and facsimile, and prioritization of their inherent errors and alterations, generates the subject as an aesthetic strategy, building spaces of tension.
Biographical Information
Jessica Mein was born in 1975 in São Paulo and lives and works in Buenos Aires. She received her MFA from Hunter College, New York. Solo exhibitions include The Pavilion Downtown, Dubai, Simon Preston, New York and Galeria Leme, São Paulo. She also exhibited as part of The Street Files – Biennial El Museo del Barrio, New York; The Julia Stoschek Foundation, Dusseldorf; The Drawing Center, New York; Wellin Museum, Hamilton College, New York; Museo Tamayo de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico; Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai; Carbon 12 Gallery, Dubai; New York University, Abu Dhabi and Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, among others. Her work is included in collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Julia Stoschek Collection, Dusseldorf and The Albright Knox, Buffalo. Mein participated as an artist-in-residence of Art Dubai in 2015, partnered with the Delfina Art Foundation, and was awarded an Alserkal Avenue artist commission project in 2016.